Train heist focus on mastermind
MEN in bowler hats and balaclavas lent a Clockwork
Orange feel to the opening scenes of the rather thrilling The
Great Train Robbery (Sky Movies Extra, Sky 031, 8.30pm, Thursday). Bruce Reynolds, head of the gang that lifted £2.6 million, (the equivalent of £46m or NZ$92m today) from the British Royal Mail train back in 1962 possessed a steel-trap master mind for planning robberies.
After carrying off a class-act crime in the first scene – that’s where the bowler hats and balaclavas came in – Reynolds didn’t like the size of the pot and decided to go for something more lucrative.
Crooks appeared to dress in suits and ties back in the sixties as we watched Reynolds and Gordon Goody put together a large cast of around 15 characters to commit highway robbery. Among the throng was a florist who knew how to change a train signal box, an old geezer called Alf who was a former train driver, and even Ronald Biggs himself put in an appearance.
Well not the real Mr Rio, but an actor who only had a bit part as Biggs was very peripheral here, though he managed to leave his filthy great fingerprints all over the farmhouse the gang congregated in to do the job.
Biggs comes across in this drama as a bungling rather desperate chancer. As if we haven’t had enough of Ronnie over on Rialto lately with actress Sheridan Smith playing Mrs Biggs, in a series about the perils of living with a notorious crim.
Instead the limelight is held by Luke Evans who plays Reynolds with great plotting and calculation. Sporting national health-type specs he looks more like a public servant than a dodgy crook, and there’s much dialogue given over to easy money paving the way to the ranks of the middleclass.
The first thing to greet the ears in this classy thriller was Nina Simone singing Sinner Man as two blue Jaguars pull up to the site of the first job and ‘‘the brothers in arms’’, as Reynolds refers to his mob, savagely beat up civilians standing in the way of the loot. The violence here is very real, not the usual choreographed glamour thuggery that washes over you.
We see Reynolds’ soft side at home with wife Angela and baby son Nick. After the great train robbery, he escaped to Mexico, then moved to Canada before he was captured and served 10 years of a 25-year life sentence.
Incidentally his son Nick became a member of the band Alabama 3 who wrote Woke Up
This Morning, the opening score
for The Sopranos.
The story of the robbery and the formation of the gang unravels well with Reynolds getting his crew to work in harness, complimenting them when they leave the farmhouse after the heist by telling them that what they did ‘‘back there was a thing of beauty’’ and giving the order to keep their traps shut – ‘‘be like Dad and keep Mum’’.
When Reynolds unloads the loot he’s shocked to see the amount, knowing in his thieving bones it’s too much for safety as the lads set to count the money all night long. The man with the final tally won’t reveal to the others how much it is till the king wakes up from his nap to hear from the counting house the happy but troubling news that it’s well over two million.
There were nice comic touches during the planning when a couple of the lads steal a train and try to work out how to move it along the track, jumping off giggling like little boys as it chugs full steam ahead.
The power struggles are a cut above the usual squabbles and pretentious male threats you find in most robbery stories and as soon as you meet Reynolds you’re rooting for him, wanting him to get away with it.